Seems to be a reportage picture, could well have been taken to go with an article on infant beauty pageants. If the object was to show how these little children are used to playing to the camera, this picture does this to a certain extent but it would have been possible to emphasize this much more. In short, this is a picture which I feel does not stand up particularly well on its own but needs to be seen in what I imagine to be its context of a picture series together with text.

Last edited by David H. Bebbington; 08-18-2006 at 09:00 AM. Click to view previous post history.

Well I've been hearing in these threads that if a picture needs context, there's something crippled about it. So I guess this is just no damned good, huh.

A pretty wild overstatement! Assuming that this image is from "Girl Culture" by Lauren Greenfield, it was undoubtedly shot with the intention of being used in a sequence (photo essay), which means an intention right from the start of making a statement through a number of juxtaposed images and thus automatically also means an intention NOT to try and say everything possible in a single image. This is more or less the diametrical opposite of an advertising picture (or for that matter a camera club competition picture), where the aim is for explosive instantaneous impact and where a picture will be deemed a failure if it does not acheive this impact literally within half a second.

I would argue that it is a little girl playing dress up. The mothers shoes give that impression.

Although after being inundated with the JonBenet Ramsey pictures and "expose" of child beauty pageants it sort of makes me cringe, but the fact that they are not her shoes but her mother's suggests that this is not the case. (I could be wrong)

But the body position and the strike a pose "voguing" gives it a sort of charm.

It stands very well on it's own with no context at all. The girl is dressing up. she is looking in a mirror and assessing. Is there a greater message. I think so. Why is she doing this? One might assume she is entering a stage of self conciousness looking to see how she looks in the adult shoes and princess outfit. (I do not have daughters so I will assume it is a princess outfit). I suppose someone could assign a more social/gender role type of interpretation to the image. From an educator stand point one could draw several connections to Piaget and his theory that play is the work of the child.

If you wanted to make the point that a picture needs context to make it work, there were many others in that photo essay that, in no way, could stand on their own without context. But, in the context of the Essay, "Girl Culture", work fantastically.

Technological society has succeeded in multiplying the opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty in generating joy. Pope Paul VI

So, I think the "greats" were true to their visions, once their visions no longer sucked. Ralph Barker 12/2004